Warning to anyone not familiar with Caddicarus' work: the video above contains cussing/strong language and dark comedy in the form of on-screen hanging, so viewer discretion is advised.
Approximately one year ago, Caddicarus achieved one million subscribers for his YouTube channel. In celebration of his accomplishment, he followed through with something he claimed he would do for his followers: make a video centering around the main games of Spyro. Among such games, and the last he covers in the video he promised, was Skylanders.
Skylanders is an odd part of Spyro's original legacy. Just like how Caddy singing about a pink-poo bag took me out of a video I'm sure his fans were waiting on for a long time, so Skylanders probably took people out of the Spyro fandom to some capacity because it wasn't about him. However, just like how pink-poo bags have a unique use, and just like how recycling Skylanders' figurines being turned into sausage has some degree of use, I don't think the Skylanders series was devoid of potential, and it was Caddy's video that gave me that epiphany.
As far as I understand of the series, Skylanders and their selling pitch was pretty simple: using figurines to engage with the game, similar to what amiibo Smash Bros ended up doing, but instead of familiar characters we're already attached to... they're fantasy midgets.
I also understand that (in order to bring people into the series) both Spyro and Crash Bandicoot were brought into Skylanders... and this is where I think the series messed up.
From an outside perspective looking in, it seems to me that Skylanders can't make up its mind about what kind of game it wants to be: does it want fantasy midgets, or does it want to bring in older characters that have a fantasy element to their makeup, but too silly for the serious atmosphere that makes up Skylanders in the first place?
Here is where I see the potential: Skylanders either needs to fully embrace the fact that their new product is fantasy midgets... or go all in on the idea of bringing back older characters together in one location to explore them with a younger audience, and I personally find the later option to be far more interesting to think about.
I don't mean just bringing in Spyro and Crash Bandicoot - there are so many other characters that haven't been used in some time that I'm sure the company could buy the rights for and add them into the collection, unless they already had the rights to them, or at least negotiate something with to get a younger audience interested in them again: Rayman, Frogger, Conker, and/or other characters that either flopped or might have a better shot if handled better.
I'm not even suggesting that they all go in for a beat-em-up: bring them into Skylanders with some of their original gameplay into their own special boards. Have a few boards where they need another specific Skylander in order to play a unique board that requires both unique play styles of the characters that were brought in. Could you imagine making a board with Crash Bandicoot and Frogger? Frogger literally looks like a minor enemy from one of Crash's previous games, so seeing him needing to work around that would be a fun little Easter Egg.
And where would the term Skylander come from? It could come from the idea of worlds randomly colliding with each other and their new unique makeup could land them literally in the sky, so the term "Skylander" is used for the unfortunate souls who's worlds got mixed into this clusterfuck of already mixing worlds.
Anyway, I'm sure you can see that this idea got me thinking, but there's a chance it isn't going anywhere aside from just me writing it down and sharing it. I thought it would be entertaining to think about, at least.
